Alix of Hesse

Alix of Hesse (6 June 1872-17 July 1918), also known as Alexandra Feodorovna, was the Czarina of the Russian Empire from 26 November 1894 to 15 March 1917 as the wife of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Her husband's depotism and military failures during World War I, as well as Alexandra's own alleged affair with the ambitious healer Grigori Rasputin led to the Russian public rejecting the monarchy and overthrowing the House of Romanov in the February Revolution of 1917. The Romanovs were kept under house arrest until 1918, when they were executed by a Cheka firing squad on the orders of Vladimir Lenin.

Early life
Alexandra von Hesse-Darmstadt was born in Darmstadt, Grand Duchy of Hesse, Germany on 6 June 1872, the daughter of Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom and the sister of Elisabeth; she was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria and inherited hemophilia from her, becoming a carrier of the disease. Her mother and one of her other sisters died during a diphtheria outbreak in 1878, while her sister Elisabeth married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia in 1884.

Reign
In 1894, Alix married the recently-crowned Czar Nicholas II of Russia in what was widely seen as a love marriage, and she bore him four daughters (Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia) and one son (Alexei Nikolaevich). Alix was unpopular among the people for disliking Russian food and culture (despite converting to Orthodoxy and assuming the Russian name "Alexandra"), her initial inability to produce a son, and her apparently cold demeanor (those close to her merely insisted that she was shy). Alexandra was said to domineer over hre husband and hate everyone but her immediate family, and she became a barbiturate addict and sought the counsel of several charlatans. In 1912, the healer Grigori Rasputin came to her court and apparently healed her hemorrhaging son, and Alexandra came to have faith that Rasputin could help her son through his infirmities. He became so close a confidant to Czarina Alexandra that it was rumored that the two had become lovers; soon, opponents of the monarchy spread rumors that Rasputin had orgies with the Czarina and her daughters.

Fall of Rasputin
Rasputin's growing influence at court, as well as the start of the Great War with the German Empire in 1914, undermined the Russian public's support for their German czarina. In 1915, she was made Regent as her husband went to the front lines to assume personal command of the Imperial Russian Army, and Alix - dominated by Rasputin - constantly appointed and re-appointed incompetent ministers in her husband's absence. On 20 December 1916, Prince Filip Yusupov and a cabal of other influential nobles lured Rasputin to a dinner and shot him dead, ending his corrupting influence over the Czarina.

Russian Revolution
However, the Russian people had already lost their faith in the monarchy due to the military's many defeats under Nicholas' leadership, and, in March of 1917, after soldiers and workers rose up in the Russian capital of Petrograd and established the Petrograd Soviet, the State Duma urged the Czar to abdicate; meanwhile, the Duma had set up a provisional government under Alexander Kerensky. At Pskov, Nicholas met with his generals and was persuaded to abdicate, and he and his family were kept under house arrest at Tsarskoye Selo. In August 1917, they were moved to Tobolsk in Siberia, and, in 1918, amid the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks moved them to the Ipatiev Houes at Yekaterinburg.

Execution
The Romanov royals were kept under house arrest from April to July 1918, when Vladimir Lenin decided to execute the royal family to deprive the White movement of its figureheads. On 17 July 1918, the royals were taken to the building's basement and shot dead by local Cheka chief Yakov Yurovsky and his firing squad. Their bodies were dismembered and disfigured with sulphuric acid and thrown down a mineshaft, and they were reinterred at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in 1998, exactly eighty years later.